Our housing market, circa 2007
So here's the deal:
The average price for homes sold in the region -- Baltimore and its five surrounding counties -- was about $317,000. That's up about 2.5 percent from 2006, the smallest increase since MRIS began tracking the metro area in the late '90s.
Sales fell about 20 percent, a bigger drop than 2006. The year started out looking like the market might pull itself out of the slump, but it ended significantly worse -- from a seller and macroeconomic perspective. Economists attribute the change to the 180-degree shift in lending.
Total sales: about 30,000. That's just above 1998, the first year on record.
See tomorrow's story for more details. I also did number-crunching that I couldn't fit into the article and will share it here once I get the time.
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Comments
See my comment on the "housing's slow note" article re: numbers. Reading this page, it sounds like you went into the MRIS and got the monthly data for all of the 2007 months for the Baltimore Area. Could you elaborate on the procedure you used?
Posted by: Marylander | January 15, 2008 10:24 PM
Sorry, Marylander -- I don't often remember to look at the comments on stories (I rely on readers to comment here or email me with questions), so I didn't see your query there.
I've just put up the answer there, but for the record: I did indeed pull off the monthly data from the MRIS site to calculate preliminary numbers for 2007. (As the story notes, it's preliminary because MRIS continues to get information from Realtors before it does its own year-end calculation in February.)
If you pull off every month from the MRIS site, you should get the same result. Tally up the sales numbers and then tally up the volume numbers and divide by sales for the average price. (You don't want to just average the averages.)
I considered comparing it against the same monthly tally in 2006. But then I noticed that the MRIS revised year-end numbers don't follow a predictable trend. Sometimes sales are higher than the monthly tally, sometimes less. Sometimes prices are greater, sometimes not. So it seemed to make the most sense to compare the monthly tally of '07 vs. the revised year-end 2006 numbers, which MRIS says is its best snapshot of the year.
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | January 16, 2008 6:31 AM